Webcam security
Been wanting to do this for a while, so finally went out and bought a webcam (albeit a Microsoft one…) for use as a security ‘monitoring’ device. Quite a bargain as well - the price was mislabelled so I got $11 off there, and there’s a $40 rebate on the thing as well. Sweet.
So anyway, the next step after the relatively painless install was to look for software that’s able to:
- Do motion detection - taking a picture every 30 seconds not only takes up disk space but may miss action when it occurs
- Upload via FTP - what happens if your computer is nicked? The photos go with it…
- Timestamp - what’s the use of a photo if you don’t know when it was taken?
Those were the basic features that I wanted in the software. There’s quite a few free programs out there that can publish webcam shots, like Yawcam (doesn’t do motion detection), CatSpy (great for video, but no still image support), LogiSphere (slow, takes up alot of resources), and WheresJames Webcam Publisher (many features, tricky to set up).
I ended up going for the WheresJames program, and it works quite well. A few spurious features (e.g. decorative frames) but overall well-designed. It doesn’t take up that many sytem resources because it has its own link to the webcam instead of relying on the webcam software (like LogiSphere does). Yet to get the video working though. Also, uploading to FTP isn’t that trustworthy within the program, so I had to use an FTP synchronisation setup using SyncBack which was scheduled to run every 15 minutes with Solway’s Task Scheduler (since the minimum interval of Windows task scheduler is 1 day).
So if you have a webcam, you can easily hook it up for it to act as a security device. Hope this helps someone out there catch the crooks that break in and steal stuff.